Michael Droettboom <md...@stsci.edu> writes: > The other approach is used when "text.usetex" is True. It calls out > to a real "tex" interpreter and then interprets the DVI it produces to > convert it into a form the matplotlib backends can use. Since I > didn't write this code, I'm not as familiar with the details.
There are actually at least three mechanisms used by text.usetex: (1) The Postscript backend uses psfrag. The Postscript file has placeholders for LaTeX text, and the file is processed with LaTeX and dvips to replace these placeholders with typeset text. (2) The Agg backend puts each piece of TeX text into a separate file (which you can find in ~/.matplotlib/tex.cache), processes it with LaTeX into dvi and with dvipng into png, reads in the png files and overlays them onto the image. (That's at least what I imagine it does; I have not looked at the code.) (3) The pdf backend uses the dviread module (written originally by me). The various pieces of text are written into different tex files, just as with the Agg backend, then processed with LaTeX into dvi files, which in turn are translated by dviread into sequences of (x, y, font, character) tuples. The dviread module reads the pdftex.map configuration file, which maps the TeX font names into Postscript fonts, which are embedded in the output PDF file, and the characters are placed at the coordinates specified in the dvi file. The dvipng approach avoids dealing with fonts, but the output is a bitmap. With psfrag you can only get Postscript output (which is nontrivial to parse), but it includes scalable fonts. The dviread approach gets you both scalable fonts and the information of where each character is, but you will have to deal with the fonts yourself. In PDF output this is relatively easy, since we can piggyback on the pdftex.map configuration file, which conveniently points to font files that can be embedded in PDF. -- Jouni K. Seppänen http://www.iki.fi/jks ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ EMC VNX: the world's simplest storage, starting under $10K The only unified storage solution that offers unified management Up to 160% more powerful than alternatives and 25% more efficient. Guaranteed. http://p.sf.net/sfu/emc-vnx-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-users mailing list Matplotlib-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-users
